Hollywood Nomadology?

Like thousands of other victims of midsummer ennui, I went to see
the apparently stock Hollywood blockbuster, Independence Day. It wasn't
as bad as I expected. Despite the banality of its stereotypes and the
childlike simplicity of its plot (or partly because of them) Roland
Emmerich's action-packed flick does take a position on the world's end we
haven't often seen in the apocalypse-riddled 80s and 90s. ID4 (to use the film's absurd militaristic subtitle) is, like so many of its ilk, a fantasy of the destruction of the State Apparatus. But in contrast to
most plots in the cascade of futuristic post-annihilation fictions, We
didn't do it; They did. In fact, Their intergalactic planet-wasting
style makes the ecological predations of global capitalism look like
spilled milk.

It is a mistake, moreover, to decode these bad aliens as more
familiar Others - immigrants, the underclass, terrorists. The merry
mood of this fantasy turns on the absence of guilt and self-doubt, this
in turn facilitated by the absolute self-othering of the aliens, who
deliberately reject all attempts at negotiation in the name of
extermination. The purity and simplicity of their malice relieves any
introspective weight from counteraggression - smelliness, for example,
can be attributed to these aliens without the guilty acknowledgement of
culturally relativistic standards of hygiene. The result is battle as
pure play, a way made clear, a path to enjoyment on the order of a
football rivalry. And look at the difference this makes to the apple-pie
Morning After scene: rejecting formulaic footage in recent apocalyptic
cinema, and counterpointing the racist overtones of the description of
looting by "vultures" early in the movie, these folks behave themselves
after the aliens do their stuff. People of color do not run off with
TVs. Men do not attack women in a nihlistic orgy of unrestrained
testosterone. Everybody cooperates.

Nor is this movie an advertisement for Star Wars technology, if
indeed one grants the possibility of appropriating the tabloid rhetoric
of "they're out there" as a ploy for multibillion-dollar funding. The
tech of choice in Independence Day is low not high; bottom up not top
down. Morse code not C3I, conventional not nuclear, ad hoc and not
strategic. The critique of preparedness cites interagency turf - CIA
versus DOD - rather than US or global disarmament as the main
contributor to the aliens' initial successes. This is not in fact a
"paranoid" movie at all, rather remarkable for a tale of Final War. It is
a much less processed and disguised wish-fulfillment.

The aliens, the movie shows, did Earth a big favor. They wiped
out Big Government. Even more, they wiped out both private and political
property, neighborhood and nation. They accomplished what aficianados of
both free trade and the Internet claim for their respective objects of
admiration: deterritorialization of a statist space that has grown so
heavy with overcoding that its nearly crushed inhabitants are not simply
itching for a fight, but dying for lines of flight. In the movie we find
the ex-bourgeoisie welcoming that deterritorialization in the form of a
nomadic tribe of Winnebagos freed from their normally marginalized and
oppressed class status, itself the result of a world divided into
interlocking geographic principalities that by definition exclude the
itinerant. The itinerant becomes not only a hero but a way, a path to a
reterritorialization on non-statist lines. But the movie ends without
any indication of where this path leads.

Of course, with an almost ritual Hollywood conservatism,
Independence Day maintains certain territories inviolate, despite the
plot's claim to make July Fourth an ecumenical holiday.
African-Americans are running backs, not quarterbacks. Children and
fidelity are women's proper business; the two erring wives of the movie
repent their independence. And Jews are smart. But it may be that these
inconsistencies follow with less necessity from the overall logic of the
film than they might from the film's twisted siblings, for example, the
Road Warrior movies of the 80s. In the latter, tolerance, women, and
children clearly require some form of community structure for whatever
paltry freedoms they possess. In the more traditional plot,
deterritorialization is the outcome of a cataclysm of our own making, and
it produces a guilty reaction formation of adolescent violence, a
caricature of white male backlash, nihilistic mayhem by and between
xenophobically tribalized skinheads for whom women become objects of
exchange and consumption. Clearly, in these films, the only hope of
civilization, and of women, is a safe zone. Rules of coordination.
Restraint. In short, some form of geographically territorializing State
Apparatus, specifically a liberal-capitalist one.

Opposing Independence Day to Road Warrior pits Deleuze &
Guattarian nomadology against Enlightenment (the Romantic hero's sidekick
that really runs the show). The "nomad" notion goes far beyond the
trendy romance of the Bedouin, just as Enlightenment is more than a
banner of principled resolve waving over liberals, Marxists, and
psychoanalysts (even as they variously repudiate it). The nomad is the
counterpart, the complement, to the State Apparatus. It is the exterior
to the State's interior, not only in the sense that, like those of "no
fixed address" who elude the census and the tax collector, it wanders out
of the grid-like geography of the state, but in the sense that at every
point, in every respect, nomads lack an "inward," a soul. If we take the
state as a hierarchically and functionally organized body, recapitulated
in the hierarchical organization of each of its members, nomads, a group
to be sure, a body to be sure, are not organisms, not organizations,
neither as a whole nor in terms of individual components. They
comprise a field rather than a set of individuals. Members of the state
have "feelings," nomads have "affects;" members of the state
"communicate," nomads "signal" - all of which is to say that members of
the state, like the state itself in its executive dimension, have a
complex interiority whose nature is, in the process of state function,
made manifest, the soul working through the body. Nomads, in contrast,
are pure relay points, pure vectors.

Which brings us to the matter at hand: the phrase "media ecology"
is either another adjustment for humanism, or it's a redundancy. It's
either the refinement of a prosthesis to help or hinder the development
of Self and Community, or it's the amplification of an anti-humanism all
set to deal a death blow to hylomorphism, the ancient dualism of matter
and spirit. Two examples: for Jürgen Habermas, a liberal humanist,
"media" refer, as they do in common parlance, to conduits for
communication whose nature can but need not reduce and abstract complex
human interactions. This is the basis for his insistence that natural
language be the medium for social exchange, as opposed to more abstract
entities such as money. Money is an example of what he calls steering
media, forms of signification uncoupled from the lifeworld that have the
power to proceed on their own and perpetuate themselves according to
their own rules and schemes. On the other hand, take David Wellbery's
description of poststructuralism in his foreword to Friedrich Kittler's
Discourse Networks.
Wellbery describes poststructuralism as replacing
the concept of the subject with the concept of the body; agency, or self,
is in actuality a "restriction of its possibilities... a reduction of
complexity." That complexity is medium itself.

For the nomad, "media ecology" is redundant. A medium is not
quite that through which a signal passes; it is more accurate to say that
a signal is the movement of a medium. Ecology consists of media. Brain
and body are both such media. They move. But the State Apparatus
maintains a non-redundancy of media ecology; the dualism of medium and
message supports a hygiene of the media, a hygiene of the organized body
of the state. As an organism, the state delegates certain members to its
frontiers as antibodies. Contrary to the chivalric myth that still
continues to march across the common run of fantasies, women and children
are the first line of defense, the real "peacekeepers;" when they fall
sick or die, morally or physically, the guys with guns and missiles come
in to clean up. The last real global defense "strategy" was Mutual
Assured Destruction in the 60s, when the civilians of the U.S. and the
Soviet Union were held hostage to crude and unspeakable megatonnage.
Unarmed bodies, not bombs, kept the peace or defined the war; thus
terrified, women and children cling to the State Apparatus.

Theoretically, the nomad scenario doesn't operate this way. If
medium is synonymous with ecology, each point - a woman medium or a man
medium or a child medium - determines the character of adjacent space
like an electron cloud. They bond together according to localized field
dynamics rather than an overarching scheme. Of course, any liberatory
reality behind the theory has yet to be seen.

Linda Brigham is an assistant professor at Kansas State University. A British Romanticist by training,
she is currently working on critical issues related to modernity and technology.